I hope many of you are planning to enter the 9th Annual Photo + Video Contest? You’ve got three and a half weeks! That’s plenty of time to make some mochis and get creative with them, but the season is only going to get busier, so the sooner the better I say. Plus, I’ve got a REALLY exciting new addition to our prizes, which I will be announcing soon—stay tuned for that…
To help get the inspiration flowing, let’s take a look back at some of the winners from our previous contests. You’ll see that there are endless ways to make some magic with knitted toys.
First, because our video category is still new, I wanted to share last year’s winner again: By a Thread by juleenbean.
Stop-motion animation is a favorite of mine, and it can be as simple as taking a series of photos and putting them together in a program like iMovie. But a video doesn’t have to mean animation—check out Suzy’s Advice Gnome for a great example of how to use live action in a creative way in a video.
Back to photos, one of my all-time favorite photo contest winners was Giant Squid Love by Jill Watt from our 2013 contest.
I actually interviewed Jill and her sister Lorna earlier this year—they’re such fun and original yarn artists, so check that out to find out more about their large-scale collaborations.
We didn’t hold a photo series contest this year because we did the back page contest instead, but in previous years I asked you to tell a story using a series of photos, and we got the coolest entries! One of my favorites was Breaking Cat by Woollenwilderness. You need to check out the blog post with all the winners to see the whole series, but here’s one of my favorite scenes from the story.
No other option than to deal catnip
And finally, I love to look back at the winners from our very first photo contest in 2007. First place went to Mochimochi Land Scene by jenifleur.
This one still blows my mind!
So as you can see, we’ve had all sorts of styles and sensibilities represented in our contests. Aside from the prizes we have to entice you with from Knit Picks, Australian Homespun magazine, and more, I think the contests are a great opportunity to express yourself and challenge your imagination to do something with knitting beyond the ordinary.
Check out the guidelines for this year’s contest. And then be sure to enter!